If, as we have been\u00a0discussing,\u00a0conventional economic growth is a thing of the past, what does this mean for us as Christians?\u00a0\u00a0Most models of church rely indirectly on the Western economic model: Solvent church-goers are required to fund the costs of ministry.\u00a0 My church is always short of money.\u00a0 We did a major refurbishment a few years ago and since then we have expanded our staff dramatically.\u00a0 We do more children and young peoples work than we did fifteen years ago and support a lot more missionaries.\u00a0 At the moment the church is considering more work with the homeless – again this will cost money.\u00a0 At the same time our costs have risen:\u00a0 Coming back to our refurbished building we found that energy prices doubled in the time we had been away.\u00a0 There is also little doubt that giving has been hit since the financial crash.\u00a0 One of our missionaries reported that the organisation she works for has its financial support\u00a0collapse (very surprisingly to me,\u00a0most of its\u00a0funding came from big business).\u00a0 Are there any solutions? The first thing to say is there probably is no magic bullet.<\/p>\n
Embrace new economics<\/strong><\/p>\n In our book, “No oil in the lamp”, we had a look at some alternative economic systems.\u00a0 Make Wealth History<\/em> also covers some of the ones we looked at plus some others in more detail (link to this blog on the right hand side of the page).\u00a0 Since no one has tried to run highly developed societies without oil etc. then the alternative economists are guessing about how to do post-growth economics and what it would look like.\u00a0 But we need to learn to separate satisfaction from money and measure our economy using a “happiness index”.\u00a0 After all Jesus said the “A man’s life does not consist in the abundance of his possessions<\/em>”\u00a0 (Luke 12v15).<\/p>\n Community will become very important<\/strong><\/p>\n Most of the new economics suggests an end to globalisation.\u00a0 In Germany self building communities are commonplace.\u00a0 This is one way of providing eco-friendly housing whilst living separately in community.\u00a0 Could this be the way forward as a way of sharing what we have, keeping housing costs down and minimising our energy use?\u00a0 There is an example in Ireland here<\/a>. The Transition movement also offers many local community initiatives from food growing to local energy co-ops.\u00a0 We have covered some examples in our book.\u00a0 Local food growing is of interest to many and we have started to come across church initiatives.\u00a0 This is an area we think churches could easily get involved with.\u00a0\u00a0Some of these initiatives will fail but others will succeed and this is itself important since we can learn from both success and failure.<\/p>\n The church needs to join in.<\/strong><\/p>\n This is what we said in “No oil in the lamp”<\/p>\n “This brings us to another challenge we will face. Working with people whose lifestyles we don\u2019t agree with towards common, oil-free community goals. Many of us won\u2019t find this easy, partly because the environmental movement and the church have had little contact for many years (if ever). However, we believe such differences do not make churches and Christians cooperating with, (for example) the Transition movement impossible and in fact both sides would probably benefit from the encounter. There is an opportunity here for evangelism with a part of the community with whom most churches have little contact.”<\/p>\n